Help needed developing DP-Achievements plugin

I’m working on a plugin which provides Achievements similar to World of Warcraft or Xbox Live to BuddyPress. Unimaginatively, it’s called DP-Achievements.

I am still working on a biggish part of the UI, but I have the admin and the main logic all in place and working. What I really need help with are some ideas for Achievements. The example I am developing with is triggered when you post a message to a wire.

Obviously, this is a rather boring idea, and while I have quite a few ideas that I have thought of, I was wondering if people here had any good ideas. To try to keep any discussion I’m lucky enough to get here focused, there are two requirements for ideas:

Has to have a clearly defined trigger mechanism.

Has to be possible with an out-of-the-box installation of WPMU and BuddyPress.

i.e.

Good ideas: updating your picture, leaving a comment on a hosted blog/forum or wire post, register with an @gmail.com email address.

Bad ideas: log-in with an OpenID, mark your home on Google Maps or upload a picture to your photo gallery. These are bad because there is no way to log in with an OpenID, mark your home on Google Maps or upload a picture to your photo gallery **because none of these features are provided in a standard WPMU & BuddyPress installation.**

I’ve got a ‘weird’ idea that may apply, though it will probably be very specific to my business model.

For me, one thing I was thinking about was having members perform certain tasks such as 50 blog posts, 100 replies to threads, 20 blog posts that are rated ‘thumbs up’ by at least 20 other members, prior to being able to have a ‘custom theme’ in wordpress.

On the reverse side we could have a warning system, where if a person’s articles are marked ‘thumbs down’ by say 50 diff users that they are then warned about loosing custom themes etc…. encourages members to write ‘good’ posts in their blogs.

Another idea is how many of their posts are ‘featured’ on the main blog where they could then receive other yet to be determined bonuses such as plugins. I don’t know that there is a way of letting the server admin actually choose posts from the blog network to ‘post’ to the ‘main home’ blog. I don’t want to use the site aggrigator, as there will be many blogs and posts such as family pics etc that have no business being ‘featured’ on my main blog.

finally, as I want to encourage my members to blog ‘quality’ stuff as often as possible, some type of achievement system for posting ‘x’ number of posts per week/month would lead to an award such as using a real domain name etc.

I know that the premium site has the ability to charge people to add features, and I do have the plugin for that, though untested so far. I was just thinking of adding an additional way for people that can’t afford to spend money to get their blogs ‘prettied up’ per say.

I’ve really been racking my brain silly for the past few months, trying to figure out how to properly encourage quality submissions on the blogs and to encourage frequent updates. I think your ‘achievements’ system is a great step toward that idea.

Like everyone else here, the last thing I want is a bunch of blogs on my network that are neither maintained or have ‘garbage’ content that has nothing to do with my sites primary focus. I really am trying to get people to blog in specific categories that mean something to the site and the search engines.

You know I was thinking about this another way Paul. New users need some handholding and encouragement. Perhaps you can detect that a group of users hasn’t met any of those criteria and do something to help things along.

Stick them in a group that others can pay attention to. Everyone knows that forum questions coming from that group should be cut some slack and patiently answered. New users may not feel comfortable asking questions in the main forums/groups. Questions that anyone has in a new environment. We still feel dumb asking them. I don’t feel quite as stupid if everyone in a particular group is as dumb as I am.

New users are eager to share their experience, even if limited, with others. It’s a group of people who fit together.

A ‘Welcome’ group they can graduate from by participating there. It’s 4am here. This might actually sound stupid after a couple of hours sleep. Ah, well. Too late to care.

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